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Review

Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial begins with a murder and a funeral, and then it gets nasty. Lionel Halloran has been pushed down the great staircase of his family’s walled New England estate by his own mother, who promptly seizes the house and sets about dismissing the remaining dependents—her daughter-in-law, her ten-year-old granddaughter, the governess, the young librarian, and Lionel’s timid aunt. On the ride back from the cemetery, the widow Maryjane says to her daughter, “Maybe she will drop dead on the doorstep. Fancy, dear, would you like to see Granny drop dead on the doorstep?” and the child replies, “Yes, mother.” This is not the Jackson of poised, lyrical dread most readers know from “The Lottery” or The Haunting of Hill House. This is Jackson with the claws out, writing a comedy of the apocalypse so relentlessly cruel and precise that one suspects she enjoyed every minute of it. What Victor LaValle, in his foreword, calls “the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh” is the book’s central register, and it is the key to what The Sundial most distinctively is: not a failed horror novel but a masterpiece of dark satire in which the end of the world is merely the occasion for exposing the unkillable smallness of the people who hope to inherit it.

The book’s premise is a high-wire act in comic irony. The diminished household—the imperious matriarch Orianna Halloran, her senile husband, Aunt Fanny, Maryjane and Fancy, Essex the cataloguer, and the governess Miss Ogilvie—is stalled in the great house while Mrs. Halloran prepares to send them packing. Then Aunt Fanny goes to the sundial on the lawn. The sundial, placed badly off center by the founding patriarch and inscribed in stone WHAT IS THIS WORLD?, becomes the conduit for the voice of Aunt Fanny’s long-dead father, who warns that the earth is about to be destroyed in fire and flood and that only the inhabitants of the Halloran house will be saved. A brightly banded snake appears in the drawing room almost immediately after the revelation, and the household converts—not because everyone suddenly believes, but because no one can afford not to. Even Mrs. Halloran, who began by dismissing the prophecy with contempt, announces that she will join “so as not to be left behind.” That phrase is the novel’s whole theology in miniature: belief as insurance, the chosen people as a lifeboat you climb into because the alternative might be embarrassing.

From that point, Jackson unfolds a long summer of preparation that turns the house into an ark of lunatic domesticity. The library, with its ten thousand leather-bound volumes and bust of Seneca, is ransacked and burned in the barbecue pit to make room for canned goods, a grindstone, shotguns, a Boy Scout Handbook, and an encyclopedia. The choice of what to save and what to torch is one of the novel’s cruelest jokes, a parody of the Robinson Crusoe provisioning myth that Aunt Fanny—and Jackson—knows chapter and verse. Defoe’s novel is read aloud to old Mr. Halloran throughout the book, and Aunt Fanny’s dictated supply list mirrors Crusoe’s salvage from the wreck with a sublime faith that a French grammar and a World Almanac constitute civilization worth preserving. The effect is to treat the annihilation of the globe as a problem of pantry management, and it establishes the book’s deepest thematic claim: that people faced with the absolute will reduce it to a shopping list, and that the millennium, once you get it indoors, looks remarkably like a lease agreement.

The conflict that drives the novel is not whether the world will end—Jackson keeps that deliciously unresolved—but who will rule the survivors. Mrs. Halloran, having initially scoffed, quickly sizes up the cult as a governance problem and writes herself into its constitution. Her first act of seizure is a numbered set of “Instructions” for the final day and the new world, carbon-copied and distributed to the household. Rule 12: “Mates will be assigned by Mrs. Halloran. Indiscriminate coupling will be subject to severe punishment.” Rule 13: “wanton running, racing, swimming, play of various kinds, and such manifestations of irresponsibility will of course not be permitted.” The prose here is Jackson at her deadliest—the word “of course” doing the work of a thousand sermons on original sin. It announces that the new Eden will be governed by the same prohibitions as the old one, only now with the efficient enforcement of a woman who has already killed her own son to keep the house. Aunt Fanny, who genuinely heard the voice and trembled, finds herself supplanted by a sister-in-law who doesn’t believe a word of it but knows how to run a household. When Fanny reads the Instructions in the grotto, she is horrified to discover that she has become a functionary in her own revelation. The visionary is no match for the administrator.

Jackson doubles this contest of authority with the image of a crown. Mrs. Halloran decides that she will wear a golden gown and a crown to the farewell garden party she stages for the villagers on the night before the predicted catastrophe, and she inserts a rule that no one else may wear one. The crown becomes the novel’s central symbol of sovereignty over the elect, passed from head to head with a grimly comic weight. Aunt Fanny has already been wearing her dead mother’s diamonds; Gloria Desmond, the seventeen-year-old scryer, will later be promised a crown of flowers by Essex. But it is ten-year-old Fancy—the clearest-headed skeptic in the household—who ends up with the real thing. After Mrs. Halloran is found dead at the foot of the great staircase on the last afternoon, in her golden gown and in precisely the posture of the son she killed, the crown is taken from her body and given to Fancy, who dances in it on the marble floor. The image is at once an investiture and a desecration, a child playing dress-up with the emblem of absolute rule, and it captures the novel’s refusal to let anything—not murder, not prophecy, not the end of the world—escape the gravitational pull of the petty.

Fancy herself is the book’s moral center, if a ten-year-old who casually confirms that her grandmother killed her father can be called that. She is the one who punctures every rhapsody about the clean green world to come with the same flat observation: it will still contain Aunt Fanny, and her grandmother, and the Willows, and Essex, and the rest of “these crazy people.” “It doesn’t matter which world you’re in,” she tells Gloria. That line is the thesis of the entire novel, and Jackson places it in the mouth of a child who has watched the adults around her convert terror into bureaucracy, faith into furniture arrangement, and the end of everything into an argument about who gets to wear the tiara. Fancy’s skepticism is not the cynicism of the disillusioned; it is the unblinking clarity of someone who has not yet learned to pretend that a new address will make her a new person.

The other characters are drawn in broad, Restoration-comedy strokes, and their exchanges have the snap of Congreve transposed to a New England country house. Mrs. Willow, the old friend who arrives with her daughters and a thirst for gin, takes notes during Aunt Fanny’s trance transmissions with the detachment of a secretary. The enigmatic Captain Scarabombardon—real name Harry—is collected from a bus stop by Aunt Fanny, plans to escape with Julia, and then changes his mind when Mrs. Halloran writes him a check large enough to buy a huntsman’s role in the new world. Essex, the would-be librarian who has been Mrs. Halloran’s lover and falls for Gloria, delivers the novel’s most painfully honest confession on a bench on the lawn: he wants Aunt Fanny’s brave new world more than he wants a furnished room and dirty diapers with the girl he loves. “I have tried one,” he says of this world, and chooses the other. It is the logic of the believer laid bare, and Jackson neither condemns nor sentimentalizes it; she simply lets it sit there, unbearable and true.

The garden party on August 29 is the book’s set-piece and its most sustained piece of dramatic irony. Mrs. Halloran sits in her golden gown and crown while the villagers are fed barbecued beef, plied with champagne, and entertained under Japanese lanterns. Essex amuses himself by telling the elderly Misses Inverness that Miss Ogilvie was violated by Comanche Indians, that Aunt Fanny was captured by pirates, and that the Captain is a mutilator of old women—a cascade of lies that the villagers swallow with polite horror, never suspecting that the real story, the imminent end of the world, is the one being kept from them. Miss Ogilvie, in a final plea, breaks from the dance and begs the guests to stay, to believe her, to save themselves. The music starts again, the villagers laugh, and not one of them says goodbye to Mrs. Halloran. They go home to die, unwitting, while the household bars the doors. It is a scene of monstrous comic cruelty, and Jackson orchestrates it with the timing of a farceur who has decided that the punchline is mass death.

The novel’s close reading of architectural detail—the twenty windows to each wing, the eighty-six black and eighty-six white tiles, the hundred and six thin pillars—is often read as gothic atmosphere, but it functions more precisely as a parody of order. The Hallorans count everything because counting is how they assert control over a world that has never been controllable. The barbecue pit burning ten thousand leather-bound volumes to make room for canned peas is the image that undoes the counting: the precision survives only to fuel its own destruction. And the sundial itself, set badly off center and asking its unanswerable question, presides over the whole farce with the patience of stone. It is where Aunt Fanny hears her dead father, where a pin-studded voodoo doll of the grandmother is found, and where Mrs. Halloran’s body is finally laid, as Essex quotes the Raleigh poem that gives the dial its voice: “Allone, with-outen any companye.”

Jackson draws on a deep well of American millenarianism without ever naming a denomination. The language of the Last Judgment, the “day of Armageddon,” the True Believers in the village who expect rescue by Saturnian spacemen on condition they wear no metal, eat no meat, and drink no alcohol—all of it is treated with the affectionate contempt of someone who has sat through enough Wednesday-night prayer meetings to know the script by heart. The True Believers are dismissed by Mrs. Halloran with a line that could anchor a whole essay on class and chosenness: “I could put up signs reading NO LANDING OF INTERSTELLAR AIRCRAFT.” The joke works because the Hallorans’ own belief system is no less ridiculous; it is merely better upholstered. The novel’s engagement with the utopian communitarianism of the Shakers, Oneida, and the Ephrata Cloister is equally sharp: Mrs. Halloran’s assigned mates and her prohibition of play are the rule-books of nineteenth-century religious communes stripped of their piety and reduced to the imperatives of a housekeeper who has never trusted anyone to do anything correctly without written instructions.

What sets The Sundial apart from the gothic tradition it otherwise inhabits—the walled estate, the buried crime, the inscriptions on the staircase, the family mausoleum under the lawn—is that the supernatural is never the source of the horror. The voice of Aunt Fanny’s father may be real, or it may be the product of a lonely woman’s terror; Jackson refuses to resolve the question. The snake in the drawing room is a snake, not a demon. The mirror in which Gloria scries the future shows her visions of pink roses at breakfast, a soft green countryside, and a barricaded room on the last night—domestic images, not apocalyptic ones. The real horror is that none of it matters. The world may end or it may not, and the household will still be the household, playing bridge and arguing about who said what at dinner. This is the novel’s deepest kinship with Jackson’s own We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House: the house is not haunted by a ghost but by the people who live in it, and they are the ones you can’t exorcise.

The echoes of Hamlet are deliberate and relentless—Essex quotes “The king, thy murdered father’s ghost” to Fancy on the day of the funeral, and the final death of Mrs. Halloran at the foot of the stairs is Claudius without the prayer—but Jackson’s use of the tragedy is almost parodic. Where Shakespeare’s ghost demands revenge, Aunt Fanny’s father demands a shopping list. Where Hamlet agonizes, Essex shrugs and chooses the new world because this one is too much trouble. The intertext with Robinson Crusoe is more central still: the entire middle of the novel is a comic inversion of Defoe, in which the castaway is not alone on an island but trapped in a mansion full of people he cannot stand, and the salvage is not from a wrecked ship but from a library that is being actively destroyed. The Boy Scout Handbook, the grindstone, the nail keg, the shotguns—all of it is Crusoe’s inventory, reproduced with the straight-faced absurdity of a woman who has decided that the proper response to the end of history is to stockpile sunglasses.

The book is not without its limitations, and they are the limitations of its form. The comedy-of-manners mode requires a certain shallowness of characterization—the villagers are mostly types, the Willows are schemers from central casting, and the Captain never quite becomes more than a plot device with a funny name. The pacing of the middle chapters can feel static, a long holding pattern of bickering and mirror-gazing while the calendar inches toward August 30. Readers who come to Jackson expecting the sustained atmospheric dread of Hill House may find the tone disorientingly brittle, and the novel’s refusal to provide either a satisfying apocalypse or a definitive debunking can feel like a shrug. But these are the costs of a satire that takes as its subject the impossibility of catharsis. Jackson’s point is precisely that the end of the world, if it came, would be an anticlimax—a long night in the drawing room with whisky and bridge, while the wind howls outside and someone complains about the coffee.

That final scene, in which the household settles in with thermos bottles and card tables while Mrs. Halloran’s body lies out by the sundial, is one of the great endings in American fiction. The crown has been passed to a child. The Captain and Essex have carried the dead queen to the grass. The windows are nailed over with blankets. And the last line belongs to Essex, promising Gloria a crown of flowers: a gesture at once romantic and hollow, a makeshift coronation in a world that may have only hours left. Jackson leaves the reader with the whistling in the drawing room, the hot wind rising, and the certainty that whatever happens next, it will look exactly like what happened before. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” someone says over the body. “I wonder who could have pushed her down the stairs?” The novel ends not with a bang or a whimper but with the sound of people playing cards and refusing to look out the window, and that is the most terrifying thing in it.

This is a book for readers who enjoy their comedy black enough to see in the dark, and for anyone who has ever suspected that the elect, once you get them in a room, are just the same bores they were before the trumpet sounded. It belongs on the shelf next to Waugh’s The Loved One and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust as much as next to The Haunting of Hill House, and it deserves to be read as what it is: not a minor work in a horror writer’s canon but a major work of mid-century American satire, written with the kind of comic precision that only someone who has stared into the abyss and found it badly furnished could possibly sustain. The Sundial asks what the world is, and answers that the world is whatever people bring with them. The joke, and the horror, is that they always bring everything.

Notable Quotes

Young Mrs. Halloran, looking after her mother-in-law, said without hope, 'Maybe she will drop dead on the doorstep. Fancy, dear, would you like to see Granny drop dead on the doorstep?' 'Yes, mother.'

Opening lines of the novel, immediately after Lionel's funeral, establishing the family's casual cruelty — family, cruelty, dark comedy, childhood

The path gets straighter and narrower all the time. The years press in. The path becomes a knife edge and I creep along, holding on even to that, the years closing in on either side and overhead.

Essex describing his wasted youth to Mrs. Halloran at dinner, his first night in the novel — mortality, existential dread, aging, self-awareness

Now I am thirty-two years old, and the path getting narrower all the time, and the chances of my dying of anything at all are one in one.

Essex's blackly comic monologue about mortality statistics, delivered at the dinner table — mortality, dark comedy, statistics, inevitability

WHAT IS THIS WORLD?

The inscription on the sundial, chosen by an unknown craftsman in Philadelphia, which becomes the novel's central question — meaning, existential questions, the unknown

Mrs. Halloran died there within three months, without ever having seen more of the sundial than the view from her bedroom window; she did not go to the center of the maze nor visit the secret garden... she died believing that snow was falling outside the window.

History of the first Mrs. Halloran, who never adapted to the grand estate built for her — isolation, wealth, displacement, death

'Did you marry me for my father's money?' 'Well, that, and the house.'

The second Mrs. Halloran (Orianna) answering her husband Richard with perfect candor about their marriage — marriage, greed, honesty, dark comedy

The essence of life is change, you will all, being intelligent people, agree. Our one recent change—I refer, of course, to the departure of Lionel—has been both refreshing and agreeable. We could very well do without Lionel.

Mrs. Halloran announcing her plans to dismiss the household dependents after her son's funeral — power, cruelty, euphemism, control

From the sky and from the ground and from the sea there is danger; tell them in the house. There will be black fire and red water and the earth turning and screaming; this will come.

The voice of Aunt Fanny's father delivering his apocalyptic prophecy near the sundial — apocalypse, prophecy, father figures, supernatural

Now I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.

Aunt Fanny, lost and terrified in the secret garden, composing herself on a marble bench — propriety, class, terror, dark comedy

I have never had any doubt of my own immortality, but put it that never before have I had any open, clear-cut invitation to the Garden of Eden; Aunt Fanny has shown me a gate.

Mrs. Halloran explaining why she chooses to believe in Aunt Fanny's prophecy despite calling it 'claptrap' — belief, power, immortality, self-deception

When we believe, we must do so wholly. I am prepared to follow Aunt Fanny because I agree with you: it is the only positive statement about our futures we have ever heard, but once I have taken her side I will not be shaken. If I can bring myself to believe in Aunt Fanny's golden world, nothing else will ever do for me; I want it too badly.

Essex confessing to Mrs. Halloran that his belief in the prophecy is driven by desperate need rather than evidence — belief, desperation, faith, desire

Humanity, as an experiment, has failed.

Aunt Fanny announcing the divine verdict to Maryjane and Fancy, with the authority of the newly prophetic — apocalypse, humanity, judgment, prophecy

'Well, I'm sure I did the best I could,' Maryjane said.

Maryjane's magnificently self-absorbed response to being told humanity has failed as an experiment — self-absorption, dark comedy, obliviousness

Fancy is a liar. She had been with Aunt Fanny and dared not admit to running away. She had not been frightened, but she enjoyed teasing people weaker than herself. Not a servant, or an animal, or any child in the village near the house, would willingly go near her.

Jackson's narrator breaking in with a cold, direct assessment of the ten-year-old Fancy — childhood cruelty, deception, power, character

We are in a pocket of time, a tiny segment of time suddenly pinpointed by a celestial eye.

Aunt Fanny, emboldened by the prophecy, speaking with uncharacteristic authority to Mrs. Halloran — time, apocalypse, chosen people, transformation

One of the things I am going to miss is fancy food.

Miss Ogilvie, eating peach pie with chocolate ice cream at the village drug store, accidentally revealing the apocalypse to the soda fountain clerk — dark comedy, domesticity, apocalypse, innocence

We are not going to need it. Please try to understand, Captain—we are not going to need it any more.

Mrs. Halloran handing the captain an enormous check, explaining with terrible calm why she can afford such generosity — belief, money, apocalypse, conviction

I never took odds like that in my life. I know a lot about you by now, and if you're ready to put that kind of money on the line, I figure Harry goes along with you. I stay.

The captain refusing the fortune and choosing to remain, reasoning that anyone willing to give away that much money must know something — belief, gambling, conviction, money

I want to mate with you in a brave new world, all clean and shining, and yet I want to be your husband in this world, and live along in the kind of grimy squalor married people live in. I want a furnished room and jobs and dirty diapers in the corners and poor food.

Essex confessing his love to Gloria, torn between the promised paradise and the ordinary human life he has never had — love, domesticity, idealism vs reality, longing

They look like pigs and weasels and rats.

Fancy's observation of the villagers at the farewell party, sitting beside her grandmother on the terrace — contempt, class, childhood cruelty, dehumanization

Please let them come with us. You can't, you can't, you can't.

Miss Ogilvie's desperate plea to Mrs. Halloran to save the villagers, the novel's most genuinely compassionate moment — compassion, futility, moral conscience, helplessness

My dear dear dear friends, please listen to me, please please listen. You are going away from here tonight to a dreadful and terrible catastrophe and none of you will live unless you stay here with us, you will die; please please stay.

Miss Ogilvie addressing the departing villagers from the terrace in a desperate, drunken speech no one heeds — warning, futility, compassion, Cassandra

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Mrs. Willow's immediate, untroubled pronouncement upon finding Mrs. Halloran dead at the bottom of the stairs — justice, violence, cycles, dark comedy

My crown! When I am dead.

Fancy demanding Mrs. Halloran's crown; Mrs. Halloran's reply, spoken earlier, about when she would relinquish it — inheritance, power, death, childhood

The first thing I will do is make you a crown of flowers.

Essex's last line in the novel, a promise to Gloria as they wait out the final night in the barricaded drawing room — love, hope, new beginnings, beauty